Tuesdays
by Baka Neko
Summary: Done for a temp-mort challenge, a different kind of vampire.


Title: Tuesday

Series: Yami no Matsuei

Rating: G

Warnings: AU. Madly, madly AU. I promise you I was insane when I wrote this.

Notes: Done for a vampire challenge for temps mort.

-

Surprisingly, there was a small crowd waiting at the train station, mostly made up of old men and quite a few schoolgirls. Hisoka stepped off the train and looked uncertainly around. He'd been told the priest would be there to pick him up, but no one wearing eccelestial clothing appeared to be present.

The crowd peered back. Short-sightedly. (Except for the schoolgirls, who were sighing dreamily). Hisoka very nearly stepped back onto the train, except it was pulling away from the station, leaving him, his bags, and the strange crowd on the platform. It was quite unnerving.

"You'd be the vampire hunter then, Kurosaki-san" one of the older men creaked forward, looking rather disappointed. Hisoka repressed a scowl, and nodded icily. "I'm from the Kurosaki family, yes. I was told the local priest would be here to meet me."

"He's dead" said the same old man laconically. "Come, we'll take your bags and get you settled."

Hisoka stops and stares at him. "Did the vampire kill him?"

The old man looks startled. "No, the old father choked on a potato and died last week. It was very sad. We had to call off all the weddings."

"Oh."

"You're very young," said the inn-keeper, who was apparently just restraining herself from telling him to wrap up and eat more food and put on ten pounds at least. Still Hisoka appreciated it- it was a very nice change from the old geezers, who apparently had been expecting someone the size of a troll and muscles like a horse. (or the schoolgirls, who had only been expecting handsome, gotten beautiful, and wanted, desperately, to dress him up and plaaaay with him.) "I've not heard much about the Kurosaki family, save the usual rumours-but, surely, they shouldn't be sending out children." _You might get killed_, she thinks worriedly, and _you're so very young. How could they do this?_

She was really kind, and Hisoka still had a heart. He didn't tell her that it was precisely the reason his family had sent him out. "I'm the only son," he said instead. "And the family's a little inbred. We tend to look small for our age." She smiled at him, and he smiled back tentatively.

Hisoka found himself cornered by a pair of maids in the morning, who claimed they just wanted to keep him company as he ate breakfast. "This is Saya-chan," said one girl"And this is Yuma-chan," said the other. "Do you really kill vampires, Kurosaki-san?"

"Yes," said Hisoka, who ignored the honey bottle in favour of eating his toast plain. The sparkles in his direction were hurting his kidneys. "...one, actually."

"Ooh" said one of the girls. "Was it very difficult?"

Hisoka remembers that night when the moon was an edged crescent and the flash of white hair. How he knew, for certain, he was going to die, and even the dark, in his terror, in his loneliness, he did not want to.

"Yes," he says. "It was very difficult."

"Why do you do it then?" asks the other girl. Hisoka looks up at her in surprise. She smiles and offers him a bowl of raspberries.

"...I guess it's because I've never thought of doing anything else."

The vampire, he is told, lives with the lord of the manor. He blinked and asked them why, and was told that the lord of the manor, to put it kindly, was a little dotty.

"Actually, he's only out of his mind every Tuesday," said the girl. "Most other days it's not so obvious. But his secretary usually runs things anyway, so there's never been a problem with the accounts and rents and things like that. We just don't talk to him on Tuesdays, or wear purple."

"But even when it's not Tuesdays, he's really fond of fire hazards. He has lit candles everywhere- at least, he would, if the secretary didn't keep putting them out. He, being the secretary, says it's a waste of money."

"...so he met the vampire on a Tuesday" Hisoka guesses.

"Oh yes," says the other girl. "He's really, really likes purple. The vampire had the biggest purple eyes you'd ever seen- wasn't he very cute, Saya? And he would have had the manor, I mean, the he being the lordship, painted purple, except his secretary-"

"Said it was a waste of money." finished Hisoka.

The girls beamed at him.

"I suppose I need to go up to visit the lord of the manor then...and no, I am not wearing purple. Not. One. Single. Thing."

The girls contrived to look innocent. Hisoka scowled, marched back upstairs, and made sure to jam a chair under the doorknob before changing.

The lord of the manor was as dotty as described, because he received Hisoka wearing a mask, a wig with curls thick enough to masquerade as a french baguette, and a staggering amount of lace. Well, the lace was probably a fashion thing.

"Certainly you can meet him?" the lord said cheerfully. "I think he's usually in the tea room. We feed him every three hours, you know."

Hisoka couldn't help himself. "Doesn't your secretary say it's a-"

"Waste of money, I know." said the lord, waving a gloved hand. "Well, I think I hired him to do something-I wanted him to model for my drawing practice, but my secretary objected. Said it wasn't cost-effective or some such, and people would talk. So he's doing something else. I think. Would you like to pose for me?"

Hisoka didn't even need to look at the rudimentary sketches. "I'm afraid I must decline, my lord. I have pressing business...yes, with the vampire. Please excuse me." He backed hastily out of the door.

"You wouldn't even have take off all your clothes!" the lord called after him. When Hisoka didn't turn back, he sighed disconsolately. "I could have settled for painting his cheeks purple."

The tea room is beautiful- green and white and peaceful, and the snowy clothed tables are laden with sweets, cakes, muffins of every description and design. It was a display that would leave a fasting hermit drooling, and from the sounds of it, someone had long moved past the drooling stage into the cramming into your mouth stage.

Hisoka's hand drops to the hilt of his concealed dagger. Every member of his family carries one; it's been enchanted to be particularly effectively against vampires. The slide of the blade is noiseless; save to a vampire's ears.

He can't see the vampire- but from the sounds, it's behind the four tiered cake with a small garden of berries spilling over it. He paces, quietly, to the left, keeping low, from the tiramisu to the pyramid of jam scones, then the huge silver teapot, still steaming.

The cake that dominates the table looks like a optical illusion-from the front it was a masterpiece of cream, fruit and marzipan, from the side it looks like a concave tower about to topple in creamy rage, the sponge, fruit and cream insides bared for all to see.

And there is a small child eating cake, with cream on his nose and hands.

"Vampire?" says Hisoka, incredulously.

The child looks up. He beams, and he does, as the girl who might be Saya or might be Yuma said, he does have the largest purple eyes he's ever seen.

He also has a forkful of plump strawberry, which he offers Hisoka. "Would you like one?" he says engagingly.

Hisoka gapes at him. And then the cake, already tottering from the lack of supporting spongefingers at the base, collapses on the boy. Strawberry, fork and purple eyes vanish under an avalanche of cream.

Absently, Hisoka pinches his arm. Then he hastily grabs a ladle from the pudding tray and starts scooping. He finds cream-coated hair first, then eyebrows and sticky dark lashes, then the nose and the red mouth all at once-but it's...stretched out. Big. Not a boy's face anymore, but the profile of a man, and the purple eyes blink open are no longer child-large.

The vampire smiles at him from under the cream, leans forward and bites his lower lip.

"Ow!" Hisoka yelps and jerks back, and smacks the cream covered head with the ladle. Then stares, even longer, as the man shrinks. The boy blinks up at him, eyes welling and piteous. "Strawberry?"

Hisoka puts the ladle down, the knife back into the hidden sheath, then staggers for the pot of tea.

Tatsumi Seiichirou is the type of man Hisoka would like to have more of in this world, if he wasn't also the type of man that made him grind his teeth is some unexplainable surge of envy. The man just oozes competence as he tilts his glasses with a finger, directing servants to clean up the cake and bring in more cake.

The vampire boy, or man, or whatever, is hustled off to the bath, conveyed in a giant antique vase so as not to get any cream on the carpets.

"That was Tsuzuki," Tatsumi informs him briskly. "And yes, he's the vampire."

"Vampires don't- change into children and back again. Begging your pardon."

"Tsuzuki is a rare type of vampire. As you saw for yourself, an extreme sugar rush... makes him full-sized, while a single drop of blood returns him back to normal."

"Normal?"

"That's why I said he was a rare type" says Tatsumi patiently.

"So he feeds on sugar 90 of the time, and 10  
on a drop of blood?" says Hisoka. He tries not to hyperventilate. "That's just not...I mean, vampires are supposed to be dangerous predators!" 

"That's probably why he's a very rare species." Tatsumi replies serenely. "As far as I've been able to tell, his kind is nearly extinct."

"Because he doesn't get enough sugar?"

"It's probably because their species isn't equipped to attack anything more dangerous than a cream puff."

"Ah."

"More tea"

"Yes please."

Tatsumi pours, then savours his own cup. The Kurosaki boy appears to be sturdier than most- he's working through his shock very quickly.

"Then- why did your town issue us a summons? If he's harmless, you don't need...killers like us."

Tatsumi smiles at the boy. "I believe I've emphasized that he's rare, nearly extinct, doesn't have the sense God gave a lemming."

"Emphatically," says Hisoka dryly.

"I will admit, firstly, that I sought you out based on the rumours surrounding the Kurosaki heir." The boy tenses. Tatsumi regards him calmly, and continues. "And I hope the rumours were sufficiently true that you would consider my proposition."

"What kind" Hisoka demands lowly, narrow-eyed.

"That you accept a position protecting Tsuzuki."

"You're joking. I kill vampires. It's a family tradition."

"But you don't like your family, do you, Kurosaki-san. And I'm not asking you to refrain entirely from killing vampires. I come from an old family as well, Kurosaki- though mine were versed in different traditions, I do know that vampires don't share well. Another vampire, is quite simply, competition, particularly if the pool of victims is small to begin with. Such as small villages and towns like this one. Tsuzuki would be the first target of any passing vampire." Or vampire killer, he does not say.

"Of course, you will be suitably reimbursed- and more than that, you need never return home." The boy's breath catches audibly. "You would find it difficult to take up jobs without relying on your family name. Here- you need never do so."

Silence. Tatsumi sips his tea.

"Why do you want to protect him?" Hisoka asks.

There's no evading the question. And Tatsumi has a hunch...somehow, that Hisoka will know he's lying. "He's something like family." Tatsumi says at last.

Hisoka nods, with the abstracted look of someone putting the pieces together. Tatsumi wonders, idly, what kind of picture he sees. Is it an escape or his future he's looking at?

"I'll take the job" says Hisoka clearly. Then he half-smiles, ruefully. "I think...I like it here."


End file.
